There really is no way to determine who is honestly active on steemit like @doomsdaychassis pointed out. If votes for witnesses were for only a set amount of time and required a person to make one comment a year for their witness vote to continue to be active would not really work either. Automation can make comments.
Now as we know the Dev-team is good enough to put an annoying little red banner thing on all pages of steemit - Perhaps a yearly banner - vote here to continue your witness selections or change them. Problem is do all the front ends have the ability to put a vote here banner up? Would that even be fair to an investor that voted for who they want and just want o sit back and be passive 100%?
It is not like steem is capable of sending out massive e-mails/notifications to all its share holders that it is time to vote for the board of directors.
People campaign for and against all kinds of things on steemit, so if someone is unhappy with a witness action there are ways and means to get the order changed, (they just do not work in reality - after all Jerry banfield is still a witness and he quit steemit).
It is the top 21 witnesses that sort of have the most say, limit the number of witness votes to 7 picks for each person, and there would be less chance of 3 accounts being able to control who the top witnesses are. (and yes I know it will be pointed out that those that want to control would just make more accounts to control the list).
Witness vote - One of those complicated issues -
Apologies for missing this one.
heh, nope. But they could stick the 'red bar' at the top of the page like they did when the fork happened.
Someone else is running Jerry's witness, you would have thought they'd want to distance themselves from the name, but his account has plenty of 'sticky' support....
People get busy, I did not know that someone "bought" his account and name. In time it will all blow over, but people will still bring all the past back up, and the new owner may have a hard go of it.